Making the news interesting: Understanding the relationship between familiarity and interest

F. Van Der Sluis, R.J. Glassey, E.L. Van Den Broek

    2 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    News feeds are an important element of information encountering, feeding our (new) interests but also leading to a state of information overload. Current solutions often select information similar to the user's interests. However, long-term interest in one topic, and being highly familiar with that topic, does not necessarily imply an actual interest response will occur when more of the same topic is selected. This study explores how important familiarity is in predicting an interest response. In a study with 30 subjects, interest was manipulated by topical familiarity using novel stimuli from a popular news source. This study shows, within this context, familiarity is moderately important for an interest response: familiarity does indeed make the news interesting, but only to a certain extent. The results set a baseline for predicting interest during information encountering, indicating familiarity is important, but not the only influential variable a system should consider when selecting information for users.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationIIiX 2012 - Proceedings 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium: Behaviors, Interactions, Interfaces, Systems
    Number of pages4
    Publication date2012
    Pages314-317
    ISBN (Print)9781450312820
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2012
    SeriesIIiX 2012 - Proceedings 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium: Behaviors, Interactions, Interfaces, Systems

    Keywords

    • Familiarity
    • Filtering and recommender systems
    • Information feeds
    • Interest

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